Charles Murray: Another Establishmentarian Flaunts His Never Trump Derangement

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Establishmentarian is his term.

But it's notable that this one-time quasi-pariah is now the establishment.

Wait. Did we win?

Let me begin by stating that I like Charles Murray. I own many of his books and have, if I may say so, learned a lot from them.

And I generally have been inclined to defend him and his alleged quasi-elitism, which I would formally have described as clear-eyed, albeit extremely politically incorrect.

But I'm now beginning to understand how the other side feels.    

A few days ago, the 73-year old W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, published an anti-Trump piece in National Review, "Why 'Hillary is even Worse' Doesn't Cut It." Or at least it was published in the online version. I haven't subscribed to the rag for a few years.

Murray starts on an annoying note, explicitly claiming that he is writing for

the tiny fraction of the population that deals professionally in public policy from the right. . . .We have been dubbed the “Republican Establishment” during this campaign season — bemusing to those like me who have trivial influence and are not even Republicans — but I’ll use Establishmentarians as a convenient label for who we are. This note is addressed to my fellow Establishmentarians, from the Hannities and Ryans to my fellow ink-stained wretches.

What an odd way to start a piece. He's not writing for say, normal human beings or Republican voters or even National Review subscribers or whatever, but rather, a "tiny fraction of the population."I know he's sort of trying to be funny and self-deprecatory about it, but it's still obnoxious.

On the other hand, giving up on the masses, so to speak, is sort of consistent with what he has said elsewhere about the "Trump phenomenon":

Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.

Oh, man. I hate being part of an endgame of a process. But maybe if I read more stuff from the Establishmentarians I could pull myself out of the crowd by my own bootstraps.

That is, if I can even understand words anymore due to my legitimate anger.

In his recent Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012), Murray partially describes an increasingly class-stratified country by analyzing the fictional towns of Belmont and Fishtown.

I assume he thinks Trumpism is the final hurrah of the Fishtowners.

How distasteful.  

I stopped taking Murray's piece seriously when I came to this:

In my view, Donald Trump is unfit to be president in ways that apply to no other candidate of the two major political parties throughout American history.

If you know anything about American history (no other candidate? ever?), then you know that that claim is out and out bonking insane.

And to this non-Establishmentarian, it discredits anything that could possibly follow, especially as the writer claims to be (at least partly) an historian.

That Murray has made many eminently sane claims over the years is irrelevant.

He's like your great-great-uncle who after giving you a fluent and profound twenty-minute life lesson suddenly proclaims he's the Czar of Russia.  

Trump Derangement Syndrome is an expression of the legitimate anger that many establishment conservatives have at feeling that not as many people are paying attention to them as they used to. It's part of a process that's been going on for at least twenty years.

And it's a debilitating condition that requires sympathy and understanding.

You too can help.

Nod kindly when he speaks. 

And praise him for one of his books--the most important of them written before the turn of the century.* He'll probably remember. At least in some sense. It's good to make a personal connection.

Murray has written more interesting social analysis and commentary than all but a tiny fraction of authors.

But his time is in the past.


*For example, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984) or In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government (1989) or What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997). Or for a really fascinating and politically incorrect read, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), co-authored with the late Richard J. Hernnstein.